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Friday, 30 November 2012

Alexander
Davidson was one of the key figures in the early development of the typewriter,
yet very little is known about him. One claim has it that Davidson was
responsible for the QWERTY keyboard configuration, but as Davidson did not
become involved in the Sholes & Glidden/Remington 1 project until 1875,
that is highly unlikely.

Nonetheless
Davidson’s name crops up in most typewriter histories, but these are passing
references in regard to the Sholes & Glidden, the early Remingtons and the Yōst.

The Yōst may have started out with a
George Washington Newton Yōst concept, but its realisation, and certainly that
of the New Yōst, had a lot more to with Davidson, Andrew Winton Steiger and
Jacob Felbel than Yōst himself. Davidson
also worked with the typewriter inventor and manufacturer Halbert Edwin Payne
(born Titusville, Pennsylvania, 1867), who in turn had typewriter dealings
with Lee Spear Burridge and Newman R.Marshman.

One will find claims that Davidson
was born in Scotland in 1832. In fact he was American-born, though a descendant
of an Alexander Davidson who arrived in America from Scotland in 1700.

Our Alexander Davidsonwas born in Pruntytown, Virginia,
on September 23, 1826. He studied at Oberlin, Ohio, paying his way through
college with mechanical work, and later taught school for several years. All
the while Davidson showed his inventive genius by
making appliances for illustrating the studies he pursued.

In 1864 Davidson
formed an alliance with W. D. Rutledge of Springfield, Illinois, in the management
of a commercial school. Their offices were fitted up with desks representing cities and these were connected by a miniature electric railway system, with miniature
freight for transportation. This method of teaching became at once popular and
increased the patronage of the school. But Davidson disposed of his interest in
this school in 1869 and entered the United States Revenue Service, later
devoting much of his time to farming in Springfield, Massachusetts. In 1874 he
and Bernard Stuvé wrote A Complete History of Illinois, an edition of which was
published for use in schools. Davidson also continued his inventing, which
included a paddlewheel patented in 1881.

Davidson
saw the Sholes & Glidden/Remington 1 for the first time in 1875 and was among
those employed to help make improvements to the machine. He also made important
additions and improvements to the Densmore and the early Yōsttypewriters.

It is
alleged that in 1887 Davidson sold typewriter patents to the American Writing-Machine
Company for a design which became the Yōst. What is certain is that on this day
(November 29) in 1892, Davidson was issued with a patent for an 1888 design for the New Yōst,which he assigned to the Yōst Writing Machine Company of New York.

Lucien Stephen
Crandall found that he was a hard act to follow. After the glorious Crandall typewriter,
with its mother-of-pearl inlay, gold filigreed pinstripes and painted flowers,
he struggled to put in a repeat performance of such stunning proportions.

In the late
1880s, however, he found a potential manufacturer for a completely new typewriter:
one William Avery Sweet - a flashy, wealthy and highly successful Syracuse businessman with diamonds set
in his teeth.

The
typewriter was the International. Flavio Mantelli covered the various versions
of this machine in an article in ETCetera No 94, in June last year. In it,
Flavio wrote, “…the actual patents for the International were not granted
until 1893, with four patents issued on [this day] November 28."

What
wasn’t mentioned is that these four, plus two others, issued in the
following two years, were all assigned to William A. Sweet. These were six of
the last seven typewriter patents taken out by Crandall – he had 11 altogether, dating back to 1875.

The
International was always going to be entirely different. Crandall announced, “My
invention consists of several novel features of construction and operation.”

The main
objective was, he said, “to produce a new typebar key lever mechanism
comprising rearwardly pivoted key-levers, arranged partly parallel and partly
out of parallelism, upon a pivot rod and projecting rearward into a vertical
plate provided with vertical slots of varying width, said key-levers being also
arranged in banks, and connected to auxiliary levers above them, which are
alternately pivoted front and rear and are connected to the typebars, in which
the typebars are guided in their vertical movements by vertical and radial
slots in the type-barring; in which the auxiliary levers are guided vertically
in slotted combs receiving their ends; in which all of said auxiliary-levers
rest upon, or are supported by a crossbar, vertically movable and connected to
the spacing-key levers; and in which the typebars are pivoted in a typebar
ring, which is radially slotted, said slots receiving more or less of said
typebars and guiding them in their vertical movements and preventing any
lateral springing thereof.”

Sounds
great, but in reality the International failed to match the impact of the
Crandall.

Thus it
came to be that in 1900, Crandall was still dining out in his efforts of a quarter of a century earlier.

Daily Evening, San Francisco, July 22, 1873

New York’s
The World newspaper reported on April 10 of that year that, at a gathering to
form a Crandall Genealogical Association in the Astor House, Crandall declared:

"I
am the man who invented the typewriter girl."

To which
fellow family members responded, “You have a great deal to answer for.”

“The
world has a great deal to thank me for,” Crandall retorted.

“I
invented a typewriting machine, and in 1874 I first employed a young woman to
write on my typewriter. If, when I die, each typewriter girl contributes a
penny I'll have a monument as tall as the Statue of Liberty.”

The
meeting at the Astor House revealed that the first of the family to arrive in
America was John Crandall, who sailed into Boston Harbour in 1634. He was
the first Seventh Day Adventist on the continent. One lllustrious Crandall, Joseph, founded
Utica in 1701. Benjamin P. Crandall, first of the family in New York City, invented
the baby carriage.

The World
reported, “Lucien Stephen Crandall, the [association] president, not only
invented the blessed and beautiful typewriter girl but has 83 other inventions to
his credit.”

Homer,
John and William Sweet were well known brothers
of Pompey Hill. Homer Sweet was a poet and surveyor. John Edison Sweet was an
engineer, a professor at Cornell University and a dean at Syracuse University.
William Sweet refined some of the steel manufacturing techniques of the day and
in 1890 manufactured $740,000 worth of steel at his company in Syracuse.

William
Avery Sweet was born on October 12, 1830, in Pompey. He died in Syracuse on January
30, 1904.

Thursday, 29 November 2012

When Joseph Peter Barkdoll sat down in 1957 to design the world’s
first electric portable typewriter, the Smith-Corona 5TE, he felt no need to
change the basic mechanism of the Corona.

Barkdoll wrote in his specifications for the 5TE, “The invention
relates to improvements in typewriters having power-operated instrumentalities …
The conventional parts of the known typewriter shown are substantially similar
to those shown and described in detail in United States Patent 1,981,982,
granted November 27, 1934, to H. A. Avery and, therefore, need only be
described briefly.”

Yes, 25 years after Henry Allen Avery had re-designed the Corona
four-bank, creating the Clipper-Sterling-Silent series, his work was still good enough for Barkdoll.
“Al” Avery had been issued with his patent on this day (November 27) in 1934, but
had applied for it in January 1932.

Al Avery

By a weird coincidence, on this day in 1936, one Harold T.Avery,
of Oakland, California, applied for a patent for an electric control device for
a Marchant calculating machine. One year after the Smith-Corona 5TE emerged in
1957, Marchant became part of the same stable.

Samuel Irving Berger designed many eye-catching toys and toy typewriters, perhaps most notably for Louis Marx in the early 1930s. But among my favourites is this one, the Unique Portable typewriter, for which Berger applied for an independent design patent on this day (November 26) in 1946.

Berger was born to Russian parents in Newark, New Jersey, on August 9, 1889, and started out working in his father's tailor shop. He died in 1970, aged 81.He designed toy typewriters on commission for Marx and Mettoy (and Mettype) as well as his own companies, Berwin and Unique. Berger and Marx had a falling out in the late 1940s, over competing toy train designs. The two had previously cooperated, with Marx providing tooling to Unique and sometimes acting as a distributor for Unique's products.

In 1949, Unique began producing lithographed tin O-gauge toy trains, using tooling of its own design along with some recycled tooling from the defunct Dorfan Company. Unique sold its trains in inexpensive boxed sets like Marx. Louis Marx saw this as a betrayal and responded with a new line similar in size to Unique's, but with lithography that looked more realistic. Unique found itself unable to compete, and had withdrawn its trains from the market by 1951. Marx also moved production of toy typewriters to Japan in order to undercut Unique's price.

Still, Sammy had done well enough by 1940 to be able to afford Caldwell Timberlake as a butler and Edna Goss as a maid.

Jacobs William Schuckers’ place in type setting history is secure, with his invention of the double-wedge spaceband line justification method which made the MergenthalerLinotype machine what it was.

Much less known is that Schuckers invented at least one if not two typewriters which went into production.

We do know his Essex typewriter, for which Schuckers was issued with three patents on this day (November 25) in 1890, was made. Mares says it was a low-priced typewheel machine “which existed but a very short time”.

The first of Schuckers’ eight typewriter patents, applied for between 1886 (when he was still living in Philadelphia) and 1904, was unassigned and it was for a swinging sector machine. Michael Adler claims the Essex Universal Typewriter Companyof New York produced just such a machine in 1890, “but with limited success”.

Schuckers’ next four designs were all for typewheel typewriters. The first of these was applied for in 1889, by which time Schuckers had moved to Newark. It was assigned to the Clyde Type Writer Company of West Virginia. Schuckers’ following three designs came later that same year and were assigned to the Essex Typewriter Company, also of West Virginia.

His final three designs, between 1890-1901, were all unassigned and were also all for typewheel machines.

Schuckers was born in Wooster, Ohio, in 1831 and left school at 15 to work in the composing room of the Wooster Republican. After some years in newspaper work, primarily in composing and printing, Schuckers became the private secretary of Ohio senator and governor Salmon Portland Chase, Treasury Secretary under Abraham Lincoln and a US Chief Justice.

Schuckers wrote Chase’s biography, as well as A Brief Account of the Finances and Paper Money of the Revolutionary War (1874). He also gave a notable address titled The Currency Conflict in 1877.

Chase (1808-1873) was one of the most prominent members of the new Republican Party before becoming Chief Justice. He articulated the "slave power conspiracy" thesis well before Lincoln, devoting his energies to the destruction of what he considered the Slave Power – the conspiracy of Southern slave owners to seize control of the federal government and block the progress of liberty. He coined the slogan of the Free Soil Party, "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men".

Meanwhile, Schuckers’ most notable achievement was the spaceband method of justifying typeset lines.

John Raphael Rogers (1856-1934) begun experiments in 1881 to space lines of type mechanically and in 1888 patented a machine to make stereotype matrices. He founded the Rogers Typograph Company in Cleveland and devised a form of the double-wedge spaceband, but came into competition with the Ottmar Mergenthaler Linotype. In a suit against Rogers, Mergenthaler (1854-1899) obtained an injunction. This became a three-cornered interference suit involving Schuckers, whose patent application had been bought by Rogers.

After some years of litigation, credit for the broad principle of the double-wedge was awarded to Schuckers and the right to use it became the property of the Rogers Typograph Company. The Mergenthaler company finally bought all the assets of the Rogers company, and in July 1895 the two were consolidated. Rogers joined Mergenthaler as consulting engineer and chief of its experimental department.

Schuckers died in Buffalo on November 23, 1901, aged 69. He was buried in Washington.

He had worked on the Essex typewriter with Martin Oscar Rehfuss (1858-1940), another mechanical engineer and inventor. Rehfuss was the son of George Rehfuss, founder of the American Buttonhole Sewing machine Company.

Tuesday, 27 November 2012

When typewriter heiress Gambi Benedict broke the law and eloped
with a still wedded Romanian chauffeur in early 1960, she drew the focus of the
world’s Press on her family’s vicious squabbling over the inheritance of
Remington typewriter pioneer Henry Harper Benedict. What was dubbed the “Remington
typewriter fortune” was variously estimated at being worth between $50 million
and $90 million.

Gambi and Andrei look as though they prefer

something else to a Remington

Nineteen-year-old pampered Manhattan princess Gamble “Gambi”
Benedict declared it wouldn’t matter if she munificently threw away her vast
share of this fortune (a cool $20 million) to marry her money-grabbing Lothario.
She would instead “pound a typewriter to pay the rent”. “I’d rather be a
typist,” she said, than a “poor little rich girl trapped in a gilded cage”. “I’ve
done nothing to deserve this money, nothing to earn it. If Grammie won’t accept him,
I’d rather take a job and hammer away at one of her typewriters from 9 to 5.”

As reporters and photographers clambered outside the Benedict town
house at No 5, East 75th Street, Manhattan (“the size of a small Swiss hotel”) waiting
for a glimpse of Gambi and her grandmother – Henry Benedict’s widow - members
of the Benedict family and other bit players in this long-running real-life
soap opera queued outside New York’s courts waiting for their turn to throw vitriolic accusations at one another. It was on for the very young and the very old, all in
no uncertain fashion.

Police escort Gambi, right, and her "Grammie" from the

New York Girls' Term Court in January 1960

The legal combat took a deadly toll, with Henry’s widow and one
of his daughters dying from the stress of it all at the height of this drawn-out
imbroglio.

Katharine Geddes Benedict keeps up a brave face

Both Gambi and Henry’s daughter by his first marriage, Helen Elizabeth
Benedict Forrest, took the stand to accuse Gambi’s grandmother, Katharine
Geddes Benedict, of concealing their share of the Benedict millions. Katharine,
as it turned out, had squirrelled the mullah away all right – in toilet cisterns
and kitchen drains, among other unsavoury places. Gambi also charged her
“Grammie” with illegal confinement, while “Grammie” was sued by the Romanian
chauffeur and his legal wife for much the same thing. The bottom line for many
of these court actions seemed consistently to be: hand over $1 million, thanks
Gram, and be quick about it.

The Gambi Benedict affair was the stuff of dreams for newspaper
and magazine editors and television producers, right across the globe. These
seemingly endless, increasingly lurid stories, about a lovestruck, naïve girl
called Gamble, were a sure bet to make page one anywhere on earth. They were,
after all, based squarely on the wages of the cardinal sins: avarice, lust,
envy, wrath and vainglory. They were about wagers against disinheritance, risks
of being caught gambolling about in an illicit affair with an older married man,
or hiding away millions in inheritance money that rightfully belonged to
others. Readers and viewers loved it, and lapped up every syllable.

Gambi and Andrei on their honeymoon in New Orleans

Here was the archetypal “poor little rich girl”, trapped in a
“gilded cage” in Manhattan by an ogre of a grandmother and made a ward of the
court to stop her seeing her chauffeur in a shiny refugee’s suit. Fairytales are
made of lesser raw material.

The story had all the trappings of a major, memorable melodrama.
When Henry’s second wife, the evil “Grammie”, otherwise known as Katharine
Geddes Benedict, suddenly dropped dead at the peak of the scandal, US Tax
investigators found millions in cash and jewels stashed away under her bed
mattress, in her kitchen drains, her toilet cistern and in bedroom closets.
Those awful, wayward kids weren’t going to get their greedy hands of
“Grammie’s” money, no way!

LIFE magazine went hot
and heavy on the Gambi story, running her on its front cover in full colour and
devoting many pages to three seriously slanted major features on her antics.
One disgruntled female reader wrote, “Can it be that all the world's problems
are solved at last? LIFE must think
so if the most prominent news story it can find is the Gamble Benedict
frivolity.” Ouch!

While Andrei puts his feet up, Gambi does some housework.

Apparently she also had to mend and iron her own clothes.

Some American columnists tried to sound sympathetic towards Gambi. After all, they wrote, being filthy rich and having servants wait hand
on foot on you isn’t all fun and skittles. There are responsibilities attached
to having this sort of dough. What’s more, Gambi had just turned five by a
month when her mother, Josephine Catharine Benedict Sharpe, Henry’s daughter by
Katharine Geddes Benedict and the wife of a Vermont psychiatrist, swallowed 50
sleeping pills in her New York apartment one night in February 1946 and died.
No wonder Gambi was a somewhat troubled little lass.

Gambi and older brother Doug in 1947, the year after their mother suicided

Did I say this would make movie material? And there’s even a
sweet, innocent young orphaned Gambi in it!

Where did Gamble get her unusual (at least for a girl) name? Her grandmother, Katharine Geddes Benedict, was the grand-daughter of the Very Reverend Dean John Gamble Geddes, of Hamilton, Ontario, who was the son of Sarah Hannah Boies Gamble, the daughter of John Gamble. John Gamble was born in Enniskillen, Ireland, in 1755, the eldest son of William Gamble of Duross. John was a surgeon in the Queens Rangers who arrived in New Brunswick in 1783 and settled in St John and Maugerville, Sunbury. He moved to Ontario in 1798. Sarah Hannah Boies Gamble was born in Maugerville on April 6, 1788.

Gamble's great-great-greatfather, the Very Reverend Dean

John Gamble Geddes, of Hamilton, Ontario

For typewriter historians, the really interesting aspect of this
saga is that it occurred at the very time when Remington, by then part of the
Sperry Rand Corporation and about to move production from Glasgow to Holland to
avoid labour troubles and mounting costs, was struggling to keep its head above
water. And here were the Benedicts at one another’s throats over $50
million! Where was the justice?

Sitting pretty: Remington wasn't at this time

In all fairness, it would seem Henry H. Benedict’s massive
fortune was accumulated not so much through his Remington typewriter
manufacturing and sales ventures as from his astute investments in art: in the
works of James McNeill Whistler in particular.

Thomas Gallagher

Ironically, when all the dust had just about settled on the
Gambi Benedict affair, Gambi married and settled down with a square-jawed New York cop,
Thomas F.Gallagher. Ironic, because Gallagher in the 1970s posed in a sting
operation as bent cop “Tom Gordon” and proceeded
to recover from crooked art dealers $2.5 million worth of art works, including
a Rembrandt, which had been stolen from the Eastman Collection in Rochester and
had found its way to Montreal.

But I digress …

The Fortune Maker: Henry Harper Benedict

Let’s start at the beginning, with Henry Harper Benedict. After
all, the Remington typewriter (as opposed to the typewriter) story starts with Henry H. It was Henry who in
February 1873 gave the word which convinced Philo Remington to commit
E.Remington & Sons of Ilion, New York, to make the Sholes &
Glidden.

A slightly younger Henry

Henry Harper Benedict was born at German Flats, Herkimer County,
New York, on October 9, 1844, and educated at local public schools, the Little
Falls Academy, Fairfield Seminary, Marshall Institute at Easton, and finallyHamilton College, Clinton. He entered
Hamilton in 1865 and graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in 1869. In 1923
he was also made a master of arts and a doctor of law. Apart being the master
of picking winners in typewriters, he was also a master of the art of investing his Remington earnings. In later life, he was described as a banker.

Benedict first married Maria Nellis (born Freys Bush, New York,
March 7, 1840), the granddaughter of General George H. Nellis, on October 10,
1867. She was 27, he was 23 and a day.

On October 11, 1879, a day after their 12th wedding anniversary,
Henry and Maria had a daughter, Helen Elizabeth Benedict. Exactly 81½ years later, this same daughter, as Helen Benedict
Forrest, would add considerably to Katharine Geddes Benedict’s woes, by
emerging from obscurity to sue for her share of her late father’s millions.
Helen was “spurred” to do so, she said, by the publicity surrounding Gambi’s
shenanigans. Helen declared herself a step-aunt of Gambi, and said Katharine,
though four years her junior, was her stepmother. Helen had married Archibald Alexander
Forrest, a real estate agent for whom a generous father-in-law had nepotistically
found positions in the Union and Remington typewriter companies, as a director
and vice-president of both, no less.

"The Crumbs of the Rich"

Immediately after graduating from Hamilton College, in 1869
Henry Benedict joined E. Remington & Sons as a bookkeeper and rose through
the ranks to become Philo Remington’s private secretary and treasurer of the
Remington company’s sewing machine division.

Clarence Walker Seamans

William Ozum Wyckoff

In 1882 he joined Clarence Walker
Seamans and William Ozum Wyckoff to form Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict to
make and market Remington typewriters. Benedict became president of Wyckoff, Seamans & Benedict from 1895 and was also president of the Remington Typewriter Company from 1902
until retiring a wealthy 68-year-old in 1913. He was a trustee of Hamilton College,
the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences, the American Scenic and Historic
Preservation Society and the National Institute of Social Sciences.

The former Nurse Geddes

Maria Nellis Benedict died on August 25, 1915, aged 75, leaving
Henry a 70-year-old widower. At that time, Canadian-born Josephine Katharine
Magill Geddes (born Hamilton, Ontario, 1885), who had arrived in the US in
1905, had been listed as a servant in the Benedict household for at least five
years. In 1961 it was claimed Geddes was a nurse who had “attended” to Henry H.
Benedict through an illness in 1917. Within 10 years, Mrs Geddes Benedict was in
control of Henry’s finances, taking action against Goodyear as a major
stockholder.

Henry Harper Benedict died, aged 90, on June 12, 1935, leaving
his widow Katharine – and presumably his daughters Helen and Josephine, too –
exceedingly wealthy woman, no more so than, if not exclusively, through Henry's
massive art collection.

Henry started building the collection while travelling overseas
as the head of Remington’s international operations. In 1901 he acquired the only
known work to have been sold in Whistler’s lifetime (two years before Whistler died), the watercolour Off the Brittany Coast.

In quick time
Henry amassed a distinctive collection of Whistler etchings and small works
(drawings, pastels and watercolours). He was generous on lending them to, for
instance, the Whistler Memorial Exhibition in Boston in 1904. Henry’s
collection of engravings and etchings by the great masters grew into one of the
world’s largest and most impressive, and he added to it oil paintings by contemporary
American artists. A Turner impression finished up in the Tate. He owned etchings
by Alphonse Legros. He had a particular interest in sketches and working
drawings, and probably bought them cheaply. A
Portrait Study of a Lady sold at Christie's on December 13, 1910, for £4.
Some came from the collections of T.R. Way and H.S. Theobald in London. Henry Benedict
had several fine Venetian pastels, including Whistler’s Calle San Trovaso. In 1920 loans from Benedict’s print collection
were made to an exhibition celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York.

All this was left to Katharine and Helen to fight over. There
had been a major falling out between Helen and her father over Katharine, whom
Helen disliked and mistrusted intensely.
Helen, described by Henry as “hysterical” over the matter, had demanded
Henry sign-over a $500,000 trust fund from her inheritance, to “keep her
quiet”, before he died. As things
transpired, she had very good cause to take such precautions.

No mention here of an extremely valuable art collection

Eighteen months after Marie’s death, on March 5, 1917, Henry and
Katharine (also known as Katherine and Kathleen) married.

They had the one
child, Josephine Catharine Benedict, who was born in Manhattan in June 1918. In
January 1938 Josephine married Brattleboro, Vermont, psychiatrist James Douglass
Sharpe and had two children, daughter GambleBenedict Sharpe and son Douglass Geddes Sharpe
(born 1939). After Josephine’s suicide, on February 9, 1946, Katharine Geddes
Benedict fought a long, bitter and controversial court battle against Dr Sharpe
to win custody of her two grandchildren. Sharpe would also have no control of
their inheritance. In the hearing, Geddes Benedict had accused Sharpe of
“killing” her daughter after a quarrel. The two Sharpe youngsters, wards of
Geddes Benedict and no doubt growing up to be told this was true, were to adopt
the Benedict surname.

Dr Sharpe and his new wife are stopped from seeing Gambi in 1960

Gamble Benedict Sharpe Gallagher was born in New York on January 15, 1941,
and graduated from Chapin School in 1959. Her school yearbook mentioned an
interest in art and alluded to “suppressed desires” – if only her school
friends knew!

At 18, she was a darling of the Southampton summer smart social set,
the “junior jet set” as they were called. Gambi was the pampered, protected
princess at parties at the Meadow Club, where the Benedicts spent much of their
summers.

Like Katharine Geddes Benedict, other women who had married into
considerable wealth summered in Southampton. One notable, rather notorious,
example was Ileana Maria Pociovalisteanu Kerciu Bulova (later Mrs Auguste Lindt).

Ileana Bulova

Ileana, born in Târgu Jiu, Romania, onSeptember 29, 1919, was the merry “widow” of watch king Arde Bulova. I put
widow in inverted commas because Ileana’s marriage to Bulova was in tatters
long before he died of cancer, on March 18, 1958, aged 68. In 1953, US
authorities had investigated Bulova’s dealings with a Swiss cartel, and it
emerged he (and his wife) had very close connections with high-powered people
in Zurich, and with Swiss diplomats in Washington and the US consul in Zurich. Bulova
also had “substantial” assets in Switzerland and had bought his wife a $400,000
home in France. They had met in Switzerland, where Ileana worked as a maid in
Bulova’s house, in 1952, when Bulova was 65 and Ileana 32, and they were married
in New Jersey later that year. The couple “sojourned in Switzerland for
extended periods”. (Note: Bulova was involved in another “curse story” – see here.)

Ileana Bulova

I mention all this because Ileana Bulova, with a summer home in
Southampton, close to the Meadow Club, a live-in Romanian chauffeur, an
apartment in Paris and a 20-room chalet in Zurich in which Gambi later stayed,
was to play a hitherto unexposed but pivotal role in the Remington typewriter
fortune events which were about the unfold in the winter of 1959-60. Ileana not
just encouraged but aided and abetted Gamble Benedict all along the way.

Gambi had been pursued by eligible young bachelors of her own age
group, but she yearned to be rescued from the constraints placed upon her by
her “Grammie” in the stuffy family home in Manhattan. She had idealistic
visions of her prince charming whisking her away from all this, taking her to a
rose-covered cottage far away.

Andrei with real wife, Helma, and daughter Georgette

Andrei Porumbeanu (born January 27, 1925) was charming, and came from far away, but he was
no prince. Indeed, he was a genuine pauper. When US newspapers called him Gambi’s
“swain”, some felt they’d put an “a” in the middle instead of an “e” at the
end. One reporter wrote, “Since nobody can pronounce his name, we call him ‘Poor-No-More’.” Gambi’s brother Doug called him a “miserable
cad”, others found “rogue” sufficient.

‘Poor-No-More’ Porumbeanu was Ileana Bulova’s chauffeur, a man
of 34 with an Austrian wife, Helma, and a small daughter, Georgette. In the
early summer of 1959, while Ileana Bulova was overseas, she lent Porumbeanu the
keys to her Southampton home. Porumbeanu saw the chance for some respite from
his humdrum, threadbare existence, to experience, albeit briefly, the high life, to throw
his own raging parties and rack up the costs on Ileana Bulova’s tab. He would live a big,
expensive lie, just for a little while … no real harm would come of it.

But then in May 1959, at a party given by real estate agent
Russell Burke, Porumbeanu met a charming young lady of almost half his age. Not alone was Gambi Benedict 18 and
attractive, but she was worth many, many millions, she was the typewriter
heiress. Porumbeanu reasoned that if he played his cards right, he would be
able to live this high life on a more permanent basis.

Gambi and Porumbeanu began an affair – Gambi doubtlessly not
knowing the truth about her first lover, but being taken in by his lies. Over
the next seven months the pair plotted Gambi’s escape from her gilded cage in
Manhattan, from her Grammie, so she could live and study in Europe and marry her
prince charming.

Gambi cleverly ensured she maintained the pretence of living the
life of an 18-year-old heiress. On December 23, 1959, looking radiant, Gambi
made her debut at the grandiose Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball in the
Grand Ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria. Three days later, she attended a “coming
out” tea dance given by Katharine Geddes Benedict at the swish and exclusive
Colony Club in Southampton. Through all this, Gambi showed no sign that anything was afoot. As far as the Benedicts could tell, all was well, all was
going to plan in Gambi’s life.

At four o’clock on the morning of December 27, Gambi woke up,
dressed, packed and let herself out of the Manhattan home. She made her way to
Pennsylvania Station, where she met Porumbeanu. For four days the pair hid with
Porumbeanu’s friends in New York City. On New Year’s Eve, they boarded the
Norwegian freighter Edga.

On the
passenger list, Porumbeanu wishfully described himself as an “economist”. How very drool! After
an eight-day crossing, the couple reached Antwerp. They spent an extra night
on board, as the freighter was late and that night’s connecting train for Paris
had already gone. They told crew they were to get married in Paris and then
carry on to Italy.

In Paris they decided against staying with Ileana Bulova – that
would have been too obvious – but instead moved in with a friend of Porumbeanu,
Jean Cosacesco, a Romanian-born lawyer.

Back in New York, alarm bells were ringing. Geddes Benedict had
been temporary thrown off guard by a red herring, a false telegram from Mexico. Gambi’s
friends were interrogated. There was talk of a “German” companion. Eventually the
clues were pieced together, and the trail was uncovered. Katharine Geddes
Benedict contacted police on January 3, but fearing a scandal, insisted Gambi
not be reported as a missing person. Money had other ways of working these
things out. Instead, Grammie put attorney Robert Hoffman on to the case.

Gambi, meanwhile, feeling for the first time all the joys of her new-found freedom, was only too willing to talk to the Press. No hiding her
light under a bushel, or anywhere else for that matter, for her. She openly
talked of studying at the Sorbonne and of using her riches to help "struggling
refugees, intellectuals and artists”. Hoffman flew to Paris and began to follow
the lovers. Meanwhile, he made contact with French police and court officials.
When he was good and ready, he summonsed Gambi’s brother Doug, then a young
private in the US Army, to join him in Paris, and they pounced.

Big brother Doug brings Gambi back to the US

On the night of January 22, 1960, Doug contacted Gambi and arranged a meeting. Gambi and Porumbeanu grabbed a cab outside a
nightclub and set off, only to be ambushed by French police. It was a set-up.

The next morning Gambi was dragged before Judge Pierre Roland-Levy
in the Tribunal pour Infants, the juvenile court of the Tribunal de Police de Paris. She was placed into
the custody of Doug, to immediately be taken to Orly Airport and flown
home with Doug and Hoffman to the US. Porumbeanu
wasn’t let near her before she left.

Gambi and Doug leave the plane in New York

That night Gambi, Doug and Hoffman arrived at Idlewild Airport
in Queens on a Pan-Am airliner. Someone had tipped off the Press. Gambi was
calm when she landed and went through immigration. But she soon flew into a
panic. She screamed to Doug to get her away from the jabbering, bulb-flashing
mob.

Gambi was rushed out of the airport under police guard and taken
back to the Benedicts’ Manhattan home. No one was allowed to see her. Even her
own father, and his new, pregnant wife Marylyn, were turned away from the Benedicts’
front door. Someone was unkind enough to scrawl “Heil, Granny” on the front
doorstep.

Mrs Geddes Benedict arrives at court. Gambi is behind her

In Gambi’s absence, Katharine Geddes Benedict had found out all
she could about Porumbeanu – that he was married, but that he had promised
Gambi he would get a divorce and marry her. Grammie acted swiftly. She tracked
down Porumbeanu’s wife, Helma (aka “Madi”)
and had her and her daughter Georgette (“Gigi”) just “disappear” for a while.
Without Helma, Porumbeanu couldn’t get a divorce, even a “quickie” in Mexico,
and a heavy spoke would be put in his wheels.

But Porumbeanu had managed to follow Gambi back to the US. He
soon found his wife and daughter were “missing”. Sensing his chance of a
millionaire’s lifestyle was rapidly drifting away, Porumbeanu hired a lawyer and
had law clerk Jack Ginsberg try to serve a writ on Katharine Geddes Benedict to
“hand over” his wife. Ginsberg, turned away by a maid, attached the writ to the
Benedicts’ front door. On February 2, Porumbeanu told a court Geddes Benedict
had “hidden his wife” so she could not consent to a divorce.

On January 27, Porumbeanu's 35th birthday, Geddes Benedict petitioned the New York Girls'
Term Court, alleging that Gamble’s “conduct has been such as to injure her
health, morals and welfare by reason of the fact that she has left the country,
has been associating with a married man, father of one child, one Andre
Porumbeanu, and has been getting beyond control of the petitioner”.

Porumbeanu was there the next day when Gambi was brought before
the court, in the New York State Supreme Court building in Manhattan. He no
doubt winced when Grammie pronounced him a “penniless refugee” and a
“fortune-hunter” (both claims true, as subsequent events would establish). “Gamble
doesn’t know what she’s let herself in for,” warned Geddes Benedict. How right
she was, on all counts.

Gambi was made a ward of the court and placed back in the care
of Grammie, while the judge weighed up “the moral, social and legal implications”
and whether to decree her a wayward minor. She was also ordered not to see
Porumbeanu, who, more significantly was ordered to attempt no contact with Gambi.

As part of her parole, Gambi was to have mental and physical
examinations. The Benedicts took precautions: they moved Gambi into another
Benedict house on East No 75th Street, at No 42, where she was watched over by
brother Doug.

Gambi and Porumbeanu, however, somehow managed to resume their plotting.
Gambi had a note smuggled out, scrawled on toilet paper, declaring her
ongoing love for Porumbeanu and saying she was being held captive by Doug.

Gambi did get out of this second Manhattan gilded cage. On April
5, a New York court magistrate issued a warrant for her arrest for “absconding
from home” and violating court orders. The next day, the same magistrate issued
a warrant for Porumbeanu's arrest “because [Gambi] was in his custody and
control.”

Porumbeanu had acted quickly. Though down to his last $10, he
had borrowed money from a Romanian political scientist, Cornel Pope. Porumbeanu
and Gambi took a train to Wilmington, Delaware, then a plane to Raleigh, North
Carolina, hoping to throw KatharineGeddes Benedict and RobertHoffman off their trail. In Raleigh, the
pair find the Press are already on to them and, told to wait a day for a marriage licence, decide to move on. They rented a car and headed to
Hendersonville, North Carolina. There they had blood tests hurriedly done and
got a marriage licence from county register of deeds Marshall Watterson.

That night of April 6, in a single-ring 10-minute ceremony on
the lawn outside a mountain hunting lodge eight miles from town, owned by
county attorney Arthur J.Redden, Redden “gave the bride away” and Justice of
the Peace Fletcher Roberts declared the two legally “man and wife”. It was a
simple, straightforward service, but it wasn’t legal at all.

Porumbeanu had convinced Redden, Watterson, Roberts, Gambi and
others that just six days earlier he had been granted a divorce from Helma in
Mexico. Much later, after the rose tinting had fallen from Gambi’s glasses, she
learned that he was not legally divorced. Helma had not resided in Mexico and
had not consented to the divorce. Porumbeanu, overcome by his greed, had
allowed himself to become a bigamist.

Gambi and Porumbeanu honeymooned in New Orleans, with Porumbeanu
telling all that he had lined up an assistant manager’s job in a plush hotel in
Miami. Gambi and Porumbeanu, however, had broken the law, they were both held
to be in contempt of the New York courts. More trouble lay ahead. And there was
much trouble coming for Grammie too:

June 30, 1960: Gambi and Porumbeanu seek to “vacate the warrants of arrest” against them “on the grounds that they had been married …that she is now emancipated; and that they are both happily married and reside in Montclair, New Jersey”. In July their application is rejected and the arrest warrants stay in place.

February 24, 1961: Helen Benedict Forrest sues KatharineGeddes Benedict
for fraud, claiming Geddes Benedict had concealed Henry H.Benedict’s will when
he died in 1935. Forrest also claimed Geddes Benedict had “estranged” Henry
from his family and friends. “It was inconceivable he would not have left a
will providing for his family, inconceivable that he would have bestowed his
entire fortune on his second wife,” Forrest said. Forrest said she had been
lulled by Geddes Benedict into believing Henry had died leaving no assets, but
had discovered otherwise during the Gambi business.

April 2, 1961: Gambi gives birth to her first son, Gheorghe
Mihail, in a community hospital in Montclair, New Jersey. The couple cannot
return to New York while contempt of court charges are proceeding.

September 1961: Helma Porumbeanu sues KatharineGeddes Benedict for $1
million for attempted bribery and being “used as a pawn to prevent” her
husband’s divorce from her. Everyone wanted a grab of Grammie’s millions. It was all too much for Gram ...

October 29, 1961: Katharine Geddes Benedict dies, aged 76, at
her home “of natural causes”. Gambi and her brother Doug will eventually each
be bequeathed $20 million. That equated to two-fifths of the estate each. US Tax
investigators find almost $2 million in cash and jewelry stashed in Geddes
Benedict’s home.

November 17, 1961: Porumbeanu is found to be in criminal
contempt of court for violating court orders not to associate with Gambi.

January 5, 1962: Gambi and her brother Doug seek to be allowed
to receive a share of the accrued income from the Remington typewriter fortune.

January 1963: Gambi’s second son, Grigoreo (Gregoire), is born.

September 18, 1963: Gambi announces she is ending her “marriage”
to Porumbeanu.

September 18, 1963: Gambi and her two sons leave Rome and go into
hiding in Zurich to avoid Porumbeanu, who she is suing for “misconduct”.

Gambi "in hiding" in Zurich

Gambi
had also cancelled Porumbeanu’s power of attorney over her income from her $20
million inheritance trust fund. She labelled Porumbeanu a “fortune hunter” and
claimed he had already squandered $500,000 of the Remington typewriter inheritance.

Gambi with Georgette and Helma Porumbeanu at the annulment hearing

October 7, 1964: Gambi is granted an annulment on the grounds
she was never legally married. Porumbeanu’s real wife Helma and their daughter Georgette
attend the hearing to support Gambi. Gambi says Porumbeanu was a “leech, a
letch and a drunk”. He is described as an “unfit human, an unfit father”. It is
alleged he was constantly drunk, that he got a 17-year-old maid pregnant and
forced her to have an abortion, and that he tried to invade the rooms of
Gambi’s visiting female friends.

July 1, 1965: Gambi, 24, marries $11,500-a-year New York
policeman Thomas F. Gallagher, 32, in Clinton. Gallagher, born in Auburn the son of a
former Major League baseballer, Thomas Gallagher, is a state police
investigator. They are to honeymoon in Ireland. The best man at their wedding
is Gambi’s brother Doug, who introduced the couple. The maid of honour is
Doug’s future wife, Sammy Jane Dowling, from Fort Worth, Texas. Doug and Sammy
divorced in 1984.

April 22, 1966: TomGallagher settles a $1 million Supreme Court action against the Hearst Corporation for
publishing a rumour that his marriage was in trouble. A retraction, headed "Gambleis a Happy
Wife" was published in the New York Journal-American. It said, "Gamble
Benedict Gallagher, from every report, is enjoying happy married life with her State Police Investigator
husband, Thomas F.Gallagher and their two boys by Mrs Gallagher's former
marriage. Last December. Gamble became a Roman Catholic and regularly attends Mass with her family." The retraction was
given the same prominence as the original story, headlined "What Now,
Gamble?", published the previous October. In that article it was stated that Gambi "is back with her lawyers for a change". It also said that she and her husband
"have been squabbling ..."

July 11, 1967: Gambi gives birth to a third son, Grant, in
Utica.

1972: Porumbeanu sues American Express for $50,000 for allowing
Gambi to open 19 packages of his belongings sent from Rome at the time of their
1963 separation.

August 9, 1974:Gambi is living in Barneveld, New York, with husband Tom and their
sons Grant, 7, and Courtney, 4, as well as her two sons from her first
“marriage”, now known as George and Gregory. Gallagher retires from the police
force, aged 41, to become a teacher at the Valley Forge Military Academy in
Wayne, Pennsylvania.1985: In late 1985 Chief Thomas F.Gallagher was Pennsylvania's top
criminal investigator. He was director of the Bureau of Criminal
Investigation in the State Attorney General's office, having formerly been head
of the Criminal Justice department at Valley Forge Military Academy and Junior
College. Gallagher had lectured at INTERPOL conferences and served as a
security consultant to the Winter Olympic Games in Sarajevo in 1984.

September 23, 1988: Andrei Porumbeanu dies in New York. aged 63.Sometime between August 1974 and January 1999: According to the National Society Magna Charta Dames and
Somerset Chapter Magna Charta Barons, as at January 8, 1999, one of its
members, “Mrs Thomas F.Gallagher (Gamble Benedict Sharpe)”, was deceased. Gambi would be 71 now if this was untrue.

Kia Ora!

Tapping gingerly. Sunday morning, coming down.
Might be my third or fourth attempt to establish a blog. Steeled to make it work this time. All about typewriters. Typewriters in Australia. Ergo, "oz.Typewriter", something a bit different. Please enjoy.